Wikipedia Seeks Balance, Recruiting Female Contributors

Wikipedia has initiated a new recruitment campaign in order to include more members of the fairer sex in its team of editors.

According to the site’s founder Jimmy Wales, the move has been taken as the existing team of “26 year old geeky, male” contributors suffer from a lack of expertise to edit some of the pages.

Wales said that while the site has lived up to the mark when it comes to the domain of science and technology, the coverage of many other issues was suffering a setback because of the sheer lack of diversity in its existing community of editors.

“The main thing is to bring in people of all different backgrounds. If you do that, you increase the knowledge base of the site, which can only be a good thing,” the founder of the Internet-encyclopaedia said in a statement, The Independent, UK reports.

“At the moment, we are relatively poor in a few areas; for example, biographies of famous women through history and issues surrounding early childcare,” he added.

Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia way back in 2001. The site’s writers and editors are all unpaid, and according to Wales, he has no plans to change the system in the foreseeable future.

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At the conference in Haifa, Israel, Wales said he wants to double the number of contributors within a year.